Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

II. Perspectives
is a highly simplified description of the
This
publication environment. In reality,
scientific
are many challenges that affect the ability of
there
to share science in an accessible way. One
journals
is volume, with over 2.5 million scientific
issue
published annually, that is 280 every hour,
papers
the lack of transparency and accountability
•
the peer-review process
in
pressures on scientists to “publish or perish”,
•
implications for their wellbeing or
with
the technical jargon of scientific papers
•
makes them incomprehensible even to
that
journals are the preferred way
Scientific
sharing knowledge within the scientific
of
they can be prohibitively
community—but
and inaccessible for laypeople
expensive
even other scientists. The peer-review
and
has also been questioned for
process
conservatism and dogma, rejecting
fostering
ideas, and introducing a time
unconventional
between when research is done and when it
lag
communicated.
is
hopeful and surprisingly successful response
A
some of these issues is arXiv—an online
to
of preprints of scientific papers,
repository
in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg.
started
was initially only trying to catalog
Ginsparg
100 papers, but he received a lot
about
than he expected—arXiv had more
more
1.5 million papers in February 2018,
than
by 10,000 per month. As arXiv
growing
growing into a powerful platform, it
began
considered some of the dimensions of
We
publishing in a real-world context
scientific
Box7.3 in the case study on HIV/AIDS.
in
III.6, discusses what has become
Chapter8,
as the replication crisis, where a
known
significant number of published
very
have failed to be replicated. The peerreview
results
process is also sometimes a source of
In a Science article from 2013,
controversy.
here, we get a behind-the-scenes story
linked
one scientist’s effort to expose unrigorous
of
by submitting a flawed article
journals
terms: Science magazine
Search
afraid of peer review?
Who’s
from outside the scientific
contributions
that were challenging to sort
community
arXiv’s categories, in the form of papers
into
appeared impossible to reasonably
that
as science. Both history and wisdom
qualify
that “out-of-the-box” and hard to
suggest
ideas can be valuable. But in order
classify
continue to serve the scientific community
to
offering research that is of interest,
by
and value, the arXiv team had
relevance
come up with a solution to a tricky and
to
philosophical question: what
important
linked article tells the full story of how
The
team behind arXiv negotiated this problem
the
volunteer moderators and a machine
using
algorithm. Specifically, the algorithm
learning
language to distinguish between
identified
and non-scientific ideas. Are arXiv’s
scientific
and computer filters effective at
human
through good but unorthodox ideas?
letting
is this changing the ways the scientific
How
shares and accesses knowledge?
community
terms: What counts
Search
science Nautilus arXiv
as
7
according to a report in 2015 (Ware, Mabe 2015).
There are concerns about:
incentives for misconduct
forpublication.
trained scientists from a different discipline.
Box 7.4: Democratizing the sharing of scientific knowledge
counts as science?
Preprints are full manuscripts of a scientic paper
made publicly available by the author(s) ahead
of review and publication in journals. This is a
new but rapidly growing form of open scholarly
communication.
Follow the link to find out.
also attracted a small number of very odd
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